I think in China you can say whatever you want about anything, you just can't criticize the government. In the US you can criticize the government but can't say whatever you want about anything else without blowback. In China the government persecutes you, in the US it's your fellow citizens.
Because google is essentially a monopoly. Almost nobody uses anything else. Because of this monopoly and all the advertising revenue, Google effectively has "infinite money" and uses it to metastasize into other areas such as maps, self driving cars etc. Nobody else can do this because nobody else has "infinite money", Google is losing money hand over fist in self driving cars, I seriously doubt that maps comes anywhere close to breaking even. It's all funded by the bottomless pool of advertising money.
Well, Apple has been getting competitive as late in Maps, and GM/Cruise is competitive on self-driving vehicles.
The big issue is Google's monopoly on english-language search, which together with Youtube gives it massive amounts of data on every person in the world, as well as giving it immense influence over public thought. I can see Youtube's monopoly ending (certainly, Instagram could have done it had Zuck not killed Instagram's attempts at long-form videos), but the gap between Google search and other competitors (only realistic ones are Bing and DDG) is immense, and probably insurmountable.
That's true, but I don't think Apple has "Fuck you" money. Google definitely has that type of cash. It has near infinite recurring revenue. They don't even need to do anything with their current technology to maintain this, just simply don't make any mistakes and their magical search goose will keep laying those golden eggs.
Apple is the most valuable company in the world who makes the most profit in the world, in the last 2017 FY they made 48B in profit compared to Google 12.6B
Apple makes so much money that they’ve given back more than 200B in buy backs and billions more in dividends, Google has yet to return anything.
Apple is only a couple of Bad iPhone designs away from being irrelevant. Everything you are saying is from a shareholder perspective, Apple does not have a monopoly like Google does. So what if they have a lot of money? Wait for a downturn and all the Apple investors who've been getting dividends DON'T get a dividend for once, it wont be pretty. Google on the other hand doesn't have as much money and isn't as "valuable" on paper only. The reality is far different. Google has infinite money but not as much money in the bank right now. Apple makes iPhone and is irrelevant outside of making iPhones. If some other companies phone becomes the "iPhone" then Apple is dead.
US is not a democracy, it's a republic AFAIK. The design philosophy behind the architechture of US Government is explicitly that it is not a democracy.
The US is both a democracy and a republic. The terms are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, it is much more common to be both than to be just one or the other.
I think they are also popular in Canada. You can get various versions of the Huawei P20 through carriers here. I don't regard them as spy devices. I think it's mostly a US thing.
yes, well said. I find this especially annoying. They also nag me to install or try something, and the only thing that the nag messages are achieving is making me start to hate windows....
Yep. It's the built in "try office" notifications that keep turning themselves back on that make me crazy. Windows is a paid product, and has ads built in. Linux is free, no ads. Why do I put up with it...
Visual studio and games. Windows as an OS just pisses me off, but every time I try to make Linux my primary OS, I realize how attached I am to things on the windows platform.
Unless you're maintaining old .NET Framework apps, VS Code and/or CLion should cover all your needs when it comes to graphical IDEs.
As far as games go, between native, Steam Proton and Lutris I've found no end to the amount of great games to play. Yesterday I started playing Overcooked 2 (native) with my wife, right after we finished the first one (regular Wine). I also play Overwatch (with Lutris) at least a couple of times a week which plays pretty great nowadays if I tone down the settings a bit, and been playing Doom 2016 (Steam Proton) which runs every bit as well as it does on Windows.
If this means I don't have to sit through annoying whiteboard interviews, or talk to HR bots, and all i have to do is just send them a link to my brainscan on linked in. Nice!
As dystopian as "brain scan hiring" sounds, I'd gladly accept it as normal if it meant the chance to get rid of the recruiters that most companies these days use.
We believe that you have the potential to fill this position but we are sorry to tell you that you may have brain cancer. We have already filled the position with someone else whose less potentially tumorous brain was a better fit.
If you survive, we encourage you to pay attention for future openings. Thanks!
> If you survive, we encourage you to pay attention for future openings.
We wish you luck, but our HMO has given us a healthy workplace credit for pre-identifying your condition and we are not allowed to consider you for future positions.
I dont think it sounds dystopian. There is a taboo around intelligence as if it is the most precious thing on earth. History (and AI) prove that intelligence matters in some extremely high levels, but for most knowledge jobs intelligence is far from everything.
Once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric. I think that people would find ways of targeting their learning towards these brain scans, without actually getting useful experience and learning, so their usefulness would go down. Similar to standardized tests I guess, that are probably a great measure of ability until teachers start targeting them.
I think it's important to be careful with the vocabulary here (if only because of the site we're on).
There can be metrics that are targets which still remain good metrics. For example, in many machine learning competitions, the submissions optimize a known, given metric; but the test data is not known. Therefore, it is still a good metric.
Based on the article, the scan basically measures how much you are using muscle-memory.
I am not an expert. But I'm inclined to believe that a brain scan taking while performing programming tasks would mostly measure how good of a touch-typist you are.
I think it is better-er than Java and the JVM and they have stewarded their language much better than Java, and now Java borrows heavily from C#. I think they will win in the long run if they haven't "won" already.
Considering the language and runtime in themselves, I agree.
But they sort of missed the point of Java, which was that it was cross-platform, and a single Java package could be expected to run on a variety of hardware and OS loadouts with no changes (except maybe in configuration). Microsoft, at the time, wanted .NET to be closely tied to Windows, and though the base libraries were submitted to ECMA, to get anything useful you had to have Windows and Microsoft's Windows-only libraries. (There was Mono, but it was not compatible with Microsoft's stuff and few on the Linux side wanted to touch it.)
Things are changing, obviously, with .NET Core. We'll see if Microsoft or someone else solves for cross-platform GUI and other end-user concerns, where .NET has historically been strongest.
I don't think the poster you're replying to had that in mind. I think it was more a case of 'you catch more bees with honey' rather than draw the guy's ire unnecessarily, just make a law that does X to help people rather than call it the "F* BEZOS law that also helps people".
Because he was not breaking any laws or doing anything that dozens of other companies are not also doing. If we permit the system to exist as it is, we can't fairly blame someone who plays the game well by the poor rules we've made.
Why is the democratic decision to leave not an "adult" decision?
To conduct the referendum and then not abide by the result would absolutely be undemocratic. The UK is already dragging it's heels on taking action WRT Brexit IMO. I think that they will drag it out so long that they say the mandate of the referendum has expired, and then re-rerun the referendum. They will rinse and repeat until they get the result they want.
As an example Ireland voted not to join the EU the first time they did a referendum, they simply had more referendums until they got a yes.
Well that's what you're meant to do with referendums. You have them to judge the peoples intent. And people's intents change over time and so you keep having them. Not to keep having them until you have the answer you want. You're making it a winner vs loser but it's not.
All the brixteers saying to not have another referendum and that's it's not democratic is a cognitive dissonance. It's saying it's not the will of the people to ask the people if they want.
Ireland as you said kept voting until they joined the referendum. So initially they didn't want to join, but then over time they did. Nothing is stopping them from having another referendum to leave the EU (like the UK did). And if the sentiment of the people show they do they, they will.
If you go on about the will of the people, then having another referendum makes more sense. 2 years ago was a long time, and peoples opinion changes. That referendum 2 years ago was given as a NON-BINDING referendum, to see what people thought about and if they should actually look at is a valid option. People said yes. So now we've looked at it, we've seen what deals we can get and we know a bit more of what is involved (and the people managing it). So now would be a good idea to have a binding referendum on which deal, or even to remain. This would be the will of the people.
It's like buying house, you make an offer first and then you get a survey. If the survey says something is bad that you missed, would you still buy the house at the same price?
If we have another referendum and people think the deals suck we would rather remain, that is literally the will of the people. If really feels like the argument to not have another vote is that you're afraid it might go the other way (since it was so close anyway). But you shouldn't be. If we have another vote and we remain, the brexit people can continue the discussion and convince us that it would be better over time. Then when we have enough national support, have another referendum. You're meant to keep having referendum to judge peoples intent. For something as major as leaving the EU we shouldn't be rushing it and jumping the gun with no plan in place. We can stay, make our plans, present these plans to the people, get them to see it's the right move. Not jump in and saying 50% of people want to leave so we must leave, that creates a big wedge down the country of leave vs remain and no one gets along.
A big change should come around slowly. This isn't a revolution.
>to the difficulties they had getting/staying in the field despite having a strong desire to be there/here
Why isn't it ok that they just aren't interested in it? Women have agency and intelligence and if they want to do something then they can and will do it.
I find this whole obsession with "Women in X" to be suspicious because nobody is interested in gender disparities in other fields and starting up "Men in X". So it's not a generic effort to understand a gender disparity, it is a specific directed effort to force women (who have agency and freedom) to go into a field that they don't really seem that interested in. Blaming men for women not taking CS degrees either directly or indirectly IMO denies womens agency and is totally unnecessary.
I think women are doing what they want to do, and they largely don't want to take CS it seems. Maybe if society stopped nagging them about it the situation might change organically.
It's perfectly fine for women not to be interested in CS or any other field. There's probably a nature/nurture argument to be made for some of the disparity but that doesn't explain all of it. For example, one of the women in the article referenced a boss commenting about her breasts, another talked about being encouraged to drop out so a more deserving man could take her place... that's not lack of interest, that's actively discouraging those who want to be here. Can any men here seriously recall in a professional context a boss referring to their 'package'? Or that they should leave the field so that some more deserving woman could take their place? To me, that's a problem. If a woman doesn't want to be in a field, sure that's their choice. If they're actively discouraged from it, that's a problem.
I've been in more than one professional situation where I was made uncomfortable with how a co-worker or manager was referring to female candidates/co-workers. I'm not talking about good-natured joking around on the job or even flirting, but rather something that in retrospect I can honestly say was discrimination. I also recall that in those situations, I was in no position to do anything about it so it's not like speaking up would have helped... more likely I would have been shortly out of a gig myself.
I fully agree with you, and I'm really interested in understanding how pervasive these issues are--if they are as pervasive as some claim, then we should absolutely take corresponding action.
The puzzling thing is that many of the proponents of the "sexism => gender disparity" hypothesis seem to regard digging deeper into their claims as sexism. It's almost as though they think "not being sexist" demands that we only sample/write-about/etc those women-in-tech who have horror stories about workplace sexism and anything else is "denying their lived experiences" or some such.
For example, when I try to understand why women in medicine and law in the 80s and 90s were so much more successful than women in tech today, proponents of the discrimination hypothesis come after me like I've committed some grievous moral infraction.
Right. Was she asked to leave so someone more deserving (who happened to be a man) could take her place, or was she asked to leave so a man (who happened to be more deserving) could take her place? It seems like someone went out of their way to make the phrasing unusually ambiguous, as though they wanted to make an accusation of sexism but with plausible deniability in case they get called out (motte & bailey fallacy?).
>one of the women in the article referenced a boss commenting about her breasts
This is not a problem that's unique to STEM or CS or anything like that though.
>another talked about being encouraged to drop out so a more deserving man could take her place... that's not lack of interest, that's actively discouraging those who want to be here
Again, I don't see that as a problem thats particularly tied to CS or programming or STEM or whatever. I'm not saying its not a problem but thats simply a general problem. I mean a woman could literally name any field and state those reasons and it would have the same impact, and be equally as bad, but those aren't problems specific to the field of STEM or CS or programming or whatever.
>I've been in more than one professional situation where I was made uncomfortable with how a co-worker or manager was referring to female candidates/co-workers
I've literally been in the room when my boss made weird sexual comments to a female coworker. We looked at each other wide-eyed like neither of us could believe this was really happening, and it was like something out of a training video it was so stereotypical. She thought it was weird but it didn't really phase her, she just let it pass and didn't call him out on it. I think he was just socially weird and didn't realize how his comment would be received until he saw our faces. Nobody said anything and we just carried on with our meeting. She seemed to just take it as "this happens occasionally" almost like encountering road rage on the highway, like I'm not going to give up driving because some people are annoying. I think she took this type of attitude.
These things happen and the level of behavior control/policing that would be required to eliminate such occurrences would be onerous. The cure would be worse than the disease in my opinion. Particularly heinous harrasment can already be dealt with in the legal sphere. I don't want to hand wave it away but, I don't think it can be eliminated in a practical way TBH.
> I find this whole obsession with "Women in X" to be suspicious because nobody is interested in gender disparities in other fields and starting up "Men in X".
A quick google search turns up groups for and mainstream media discussion of men in nursing and men in teaching.
Is it "suspicious" that one that you as an engineer see the most of is the one that (a) involves your own field and (b) involves a currently-extremely-prominent-in-media-overall field (fake news, election meddling, self-driving cars, Uber, etc)?
I think anyone who reads HN or other tech media is incredibly disproportionately overexposed to the tech gender conversation compared to the general public.
It just isn't a thing that registers much for the non-engineering people I know.
I have no idea how much I'd see discussion about men in nursing if I was a nurse. I know a few (women) nurse, it's something they've mentioned occasionally, same with teachers. But in both cases, you see much less of anything about those fields in the news right now.
The fact that major media publications carry stories on gender in tech but not in nursing, teaching, etc (or at least very infrequently) is a pretty good indication that the issue in tech gets more promotion. And this shouldn't surprise anyone; women's issues in general enjoy quite a lot more promotion than men's issues (e.g., "wage gap" vs workplace fatality gap, breast cancer vs prostate cancer, sexual assault vs literally every other kind of assault, etc).
This is me with my tinfoil hat on, but I think the real reason behind the push to get women into tech is to drive down wages by growing the labor pool. That's the real reason IMO that big companies and others are pushing so hard for women to code and to get into STEM. I don't think that these big companies really care about women or anything, but doubling the labor pool and thus driving down wages, now that's something I can really see big corps getting on board with.
